“Not on yer life, mista. De capitan he not singa no song. He just tella de Ostrichun datta Italia, she ready fer him. Datta all.” I looked down to the valley where line after line of trenches, fronted with a furry brown fringe that I knew to be rusting barbed wire, stretched out of sight over the divides on either hand, and where, for every gray-black geyser of smoke that marked the bursting of an Austrian shell, a half-dozen vivid flame-spurts, flashing out from unguessed caverns on the mountain-side, told that the compliment was being returned with heavy interest. “Yes, Italy is ready for them,” I thought; and whether she has to hold here and there--as she may--in defence, or whether she goes forward all along the line in triumphant offence--whichever it is, the Italian soldier will go out to the battle with a song on his lips, a song that no bullet which leaves the blood pulsing through his veins and breath in his lungs will have power to stop. BLOWING UP THE CASTELLETTO It was about the middle of last July that the laconic Italian bulletin recorded, in effect, that the blowing of the top off a certain mountain in the Dolomite region had been accomplished with complete success, and that a considerable extension of line had been possible as a consequence. That was about all there was to it, I believe; and yet the wonder engendered by the superb audacity of the thing had haunted me from the first. There was no suggestion of a hint of how it was done, or even why it was done. All that was left to the imagination, and the result--in my own case at least--was the awakening of a burning interest in the ways of the warriors who were wont to throw mountain peaks and fragments of glacier at one another as the everyday plains-bred soldier throws hand-grenades, which, waxing rather than waning as the weeks went by, finally impelled me to attempt a visit to the Austro-Italian Alpine Front at a time of year when the weather conditions threatened to be all but, if not quite, prohibitive. “With twenty-five degrees of frost at sea-level in France,” observed a French officer at Amiens to whom I confided the plan, “what do you expect to find at 10,000 feet on the Tyrol?” “A number of things which they don’t do at sea-level in France or anywhere else,” I replied, “but especially _why_ they blow the tops off mountain peaks, and _how_ they blow the tops off mountain peaks.” Even in Rome and Milan (though there were some who claimed social acquaintance with the Titans who had been conforming Alpine scenery to tactical exigency), they still spoke vaguely of the thing as “_fantastico_” and “_incredibile_,” as men might refer to operations in the Mountains of the Moon.